Pretty weird weather right now, warm and gray and on the verge of raining. We went for a walk over to the South Side this morning, wearing our raincoats (but we didn’t bring umbrellas), and it was spitting every so often. We were one-for-three on the coffee shops: Zekraft (the new place) is closed Mondays, and so is Lit, and we found this out by trying the doors at each of them, and so that’s how we found ourselves at Deja Brew. Pretty nice place, even if it isn’t usually on our cafe radar… On the way home we stopped at a candy store, and now I’m humming along on caffeine and jelly beans.
The Weekend
We had a bit of a blowout on Friday night, at least by our standards: we walked over to Christkindlmarkt with Scott and Kellyn, and grabbed dinner and a few beers afterward at F & A Grog House, the new place where McGrady’s used to be. It’s run by some of the old Which Brew and Porter’s crew, and it has serious bar food and a a great beer selection. We scarfed down our burgers and brews, and then…we walked back over the river to Joe’s Tavern, where we met our neighbor Christine for karaoke. Kellyn and Christine both sang, two songs each in fact, but Anne and I just kicked back and enjoyed the people-watching. The place was packed (we even saw our old friend Maria E), and we didn’t get home until after 1:00.
Saturday morning should have had a slow start, but we had a CAT ride in the morning, and so we were out of the house by about 9:30. Our ride went through East Allentown, across the Tilghman Street Bridge (still closed for construction, but open to bikes) and through Jordan Park, before returning by way of Luna Bakery. I had myself a good nap in the afternoon, and Sunday was pretty subdued.
GnuCash, Again
I’m currently looking over our last year’s finances, and once again I’m making a stab at using GnuCash. This is a great, open-source accounting/money-management program, and I’ve managed to get a lot of benefit out of it before, but every time I’ve used it I ran into the same problem: my use case is pretty simple, but the program is so full of features that my simple project starts suffering from “scope creep,” and in the meantime the program requires a lot of detail-oriented data entry, only some of which is easily automated — it gets tedious if I try to do too much, which is pretty much inevitable once my ambitions kick in. We’ll see what I can get out of it this time. KISS!
